A quick google on the subject turned up works only in Italian, so I thought I would ask here. The dialect native to the Republic of San Marino has many words that are very different to standard Italian. What fascinates me about it, though, is the fact that many of these words feel more French than Italian. Instead of "tasca" for "pocket", sammarinese uses "sacocha", not unlike the French "sacoche", "satchel." Instead of "naso" (nah-so) the sammarinese is nay-z(phoneticised spelling). "Orologio" (watch) becomes arlog (French orlogie). These are only a few, but an English friend in the area mentioned that he finds the dialect easier to understand than Italian, because of its similarities to French. My question is, how did a small, geographically isolated community hundreds of kilometres from France end up speaking a heavily frenchified sort of Italian?

Here's a possible clue; the bolding is mine: About half of San Marino citizens are residents abroad, mainly in Italy, the United States, and France. This is from:http://www.1upinfo.com/encyclopedia/S/SanMarin-people-economy-and-government.htmlThe site says a community there was formed by the mid-5th. century--rather before anything that relates very closely to modern-day French, is it not? There is no mention of ever having been ruled by France, so I kind of doubt that what you heard is a legacy. I dunno--I'm just stringing together a couple of facts with some rather tenuous logic. Um--I was ...surprised isn't quite strong enough...bemused, maybe--to read that they have a political party called the Christian Democrats. This is a mind-boggling oxymoron, to me. (And, NO, I am not inviting discussion on that last, here, any more than I was in the other thread; simply posting some thoughts that are new to me. If anyone is offended, let me know and I'll be happy to delete.)

A guidebook published in the Republic agrees, saying:San Marino knew its golden hour when Napoleon Bonaparte came to Italy and passed near the tiny Republic. Impressed by the pride of its people and by their freedom-loving tradition, he declared: "We must preserve San Marino as an example of liberty. He sent Monge, his ambassador and a famous mathematician to Mount Titano, giving him the task to express his friendship to its inhabitants. . . . Napoloeon never changed his mind and in 1805, he received with full honours Antonio Onofri, a Sammarinese messenger who was in Milan to reach a useful amendment of the Commercial Treaty already in force between the Cisalpine Republic and the San Marino Republic.

You will note that I didn't actually say that San Marino was occupied by the French. I didn't state that Napoleon invaded Italy, never mind San Marino. I just said that the French had come visiting for extended periods of time. One of the most traumatic of those visits for the Italians was during the Renaissance ... not sure whether San Marino was invaded then, or ever, for that matter.

Having a few spare minutes, I decided to actually visit some of the sites on my page of links. The Easton site had some great links to pages on Italian dialects, among which I found this:--------------------------------------------There are two major groups of Italian dialects, excepting the Sardinian group which is considered another language entirely. These two groups are separated by the Spezia-Rimini line, named for the two cities near which it passes; the line runs east-west across the peninsula, for the most part following the border between Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna, then cutting into the Marches. Above the divide lie the Northern (Settentrionale) dialects; below it the Central-Southern (Centro-Meridionale) dialects.

The Septentrional or Northern dialects in turn are divided into two main groups: the largest of these geographically is the Gallo-Italic group, encompassing the regions of Liguria, Piedmont, Lombardy, and Emilia-Romagna, as well as parts of Trentino-Alto Adige. It is named for the Gauls which once inhabited this part of Italy, and who, it seems, left traces of their Celtic speech in the modern dialects. Next largest is the Venetic group, whose borders loosely follow the region of Veneto. (ea)------------------------------------

This fits nicely with what I heard, and with what a friend who lives locally told me of his mother's dialect. She comes from a small village near Rimini, and one example of the dialect is the word for "Madonna", which is "Madosca". The error I made was in assuming that Sammarinese was a distinct dialect, when it was always much more likely to be very closely related to the dialect of the region of Italy surrounding it.

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